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人類學 – 開欄文
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火最初對人類最大的用處-Tom Metcalfe
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Why Did Early Humans First Use Fire?
Did human ancestors use fire to cook their meat? Some argue it served another, more valuable purpose.
Tom Metcalfe, 06/26/25 (Updated 06/29/25)
The control of fire was a critical element of early humans' survival and evolution. But how was it first used? While researchers have long proposed that early humans used fire to cook meat, some now argue they may have harnessed it mainly to smoke meat and to scare away animals.
By calculating how much energy was gained by cooking meat on early fires, researchers determined that it was not worth the energy to build and maintain the fire for cooking alone. Instead, by smoking the meat, early humans could have ensured they could eat it for longer.
"When you hunt a big animal, you're getting about a million calories," explains Miki Ben-Dor, a paleoanthropologist at Israel's Tel Aviv University who authored the May 2025 study in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition. "And you could use it for quite some time—weeks, maybe—if you preserve it so you don't lose all of these calories."
When Did Early Humans First Use Fire?
Scientists have hypothesized that early humans started using fire about one million years ago. Some scientists suggest fire was first used even earlier by Homo erectus, who lived in Africa up to 1.9 million years ago—although studies suggest Homo erectus only "gathered" flames at the edges of wildfires and had no knowledge of making it with sticks and flints.
Ben-Dor argues early humans may have started using fire to smoke meat as far back as one million years ago. This would predate not only our own human species, Homo sapiens, but also the Neanderthals and Denisovans before us.
Many experts have accepted the idea that cooking meat was a big reason for the spread of the use of fire among humans (and it is still used, in safer forms, by humans today). But Ben-Dor and his colleagues propose that smoking it was fire’s first use among humans, with the added benefit that it kept hungry animals away.
Dried Meat Is Lighter Meat
Ben-Dor adds that smoking meat would also dry it out—raw meat is about three quarters water—and make it much lighter to carry, which would have been important to nomadic hunter-gatherers. He gave the example of modern hunter-gatherers in Africa's Congo region who hunt elephants for meat that they mostly trade to farming people who live nearby. "They dry it,” he says, “so it's much easier to carry—about quarter of the weight."
Meanwhile, fire "gathered" from wildfires could be kept going for weeks, months or even longer by carefully tending the flames and embers, which could even be transported to other sites. "There is some evidence of hunter-gatherers maintaining fire—they can keep it going for a long time while just moving it around," he says.
Cooking meat makes its proteins and fats more digestible for humans, which results in about an 8 percent increase in the energy derived from it as food, according to calculations by Ben-Dor and his co-author, Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ran Barkai. But they found that this moderate increase in energy was not enough to counter the energy needed to make the fire in the first place.
"Fire served two essential purposes for early humans—first, to guard large game from predators and scavengers that sought to seize the 'treasure,' and second, to preserve the meat through smoking and drying, preventing spoilage and allowing it to be consumed over time," the authors said in a statement. Cooking, it seemed, was only a secondary benefit.
Did Early Humans Prefer Cooked Meat Flavor?
But some other archaeologists are not convinced. Archaeologist Andrew Sorensen of Leiden University in the Netherlands, who studies the early human use of fires, argues that smoking meat would have been a very laborious and large-scale activity, perhaps even requiring building structures for hanging the meat. “I don't think the archaeologist record supports such complex activities during the early time period in question,” he says.
He also questions whether such early human ancestors would have been able to consume a freshly killed large mammal before it turned rancid.
"I would give them two to seven days, depending on the temperature and the season, before they would have had a problem eating it," he says.
Sorensen, whose research has determined that at least some Neanderthals knew how to make fire and not just how to gather it from wildfires, adds that cooking meat might have had consequences that could not be easily quantified as bioenergetic calculations.
"A lot of fire uses are not tangible," he says. "People could have been using fire to cook because they really liked the taste."
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林德索人的DNA ---- Michael Natale
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Scientists Sequenced the DNA of the ‘Last Neanderthal’—and It Alters Human History
Discover new clues about how our ancient relatives disappeared from time.
Michael Natale, 11/17/25
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
* In 2015, a paleoanthropology team discovered jaw remains of a roughly 42,000-year-old Neanderthal in France.
* Over the next several years, the team, led by Ludovic Slimak, found more of the Neanderthal’s remains and began to analyze its genome.
* Despite its proximity to other groups of Neanderthals and the era’s modern humans, the lineage of the specimen, dubbed “Thorin,” found by Slimak managed to stay totally isolated from groups of other early beings.
“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something,” says Thorin Oakenshield in J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved fantasy novel The Hobbit. “You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
For example, in 2015, paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak made a remarkable discovery at Grotte Mandrin, a cave in Rhône Valley, France. He and his team had been working the area since 1998 to find remnants of humanity’s prehistoric forbearers, and after 17 years, they certainly found something: a piece of a jaw belonging to a Neanderthal.
As the years went on, more and more remains of this Neanderthal were discovered. “I began to find {remnants of the Neanderthal's jaw} in 2015,” Slimak told the New Statesman in 2022, “but each year we find one tooth, or one fragment of bone.” Slimak determined that this particular Neanderthal lived 42,000 years ago, towards the end of that species’ time on this planet.
As such, he named the Neanderthal Thorin after the Tolkien character. “Thorin in the Hobbit is one of the last dwarf kings under the mountain and the last of its lineage,” Slimak told the website IFLScience. “Thorin the Neanderthal is also an end of lineage. An end of a way to be human.”
To confirm his suspicions about Thorin’s age and attempt to glean more information about not just when but how this particular specimen lived, Slimak and his colleagues had Thorin’s genome analyzed. The results, published in the journal Cell Genomics, show that Thorin’s lineage managed to stay isolated from the rest of the Neanderthal population, “in spite of the fact that other groups lived nearby.”
Nearly a decade before ever finding Thorin, Slimak had already theorized that any Neanderthals who had resided in the Rhône Valley would have been different from those in the surrounding areas. His assessment, at that point, was based on the stone tools found at various sites, noting that those in the Rhône Valley didn’t reflect the newer tool-making style found at other locations.
“It turns out that what I proposed 20 years ago was predictive,” Slimak told the publication Live Science. “The population of Thorin had spent 50 millennia without exchanging a single gene with the classical Neanderthal populations.” The analysis showed that Thorin had “high genetic homozygosity,” which indicates inbreeding in the lineage’s recent past. It also offers no evidence of interbreeding with modern humans of the time.
“Everything must be rewritten about the greatest extinction in humanity and our understanding of this incredible process that will lead Homo sapiens to remain the only survival of humanity,” Slimak said in assessing what this discovery means. “How can we imagine populations that lived for 50 millennia in isolation while they are only two weeks’ walk from each other? All processes need to be rethought.”
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科學家分解埃及人先祖「基因組合」 -- Ashley Strickland
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The first genome sequenced from ancient Egypt reveals surprising ancestry, scientists say
Ashley Strickland, CNN, 07/03/25
A facial reconstruction was made using a 3D scan of the Egyptian man's skull. - Caroline Wilkinson, Liverpool John Moores University 請至原網頁觀看照片
In a long-sought first, researchers have sequenced the entire genome of an ancient Egyptian person, revealing unprecedented insight about the ancestry of a man who lived during the time when the first pyramids were built.
The man, whose remains were found buried in a sealed clay pot in Nuwayrat, a village south of Cairo, lived sometime between 4,500 and 4,800 years ago, which makes his DNA the oldest ancient Egyptian sample yet extracted. The researchers concluded that 80% of his genetic material came from ancient people in North Africa while 20% traced back to people in West Asia and the Mesopotamia region.
Their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer new clues to suggest there were ancient cultural connections between ancient Egypt and societies within the Fertile Crescent, an area that includes modern-day Iraq (once known as Mesopotamia), Iran and Jordan. While scientists have suspected these connections, before now the only evidence for them was archaeological, rather than genetic.
The scientists also studied the man’s skeleton to determine more about his identity and found extensive evidence of hard labor over the course of a long life.
“Piecing together all the clues from this individual’s DNA, bones and teeth have allowed us to build a comprehensive picture,” said lead study author Dr. Adeline Morez Jacobs, visiting research fellow at England’s Liverpool John Moores University, in a statement. “We hope that future DNA samples from ancient Egypt can expand on when precisely this movement from West Asia started.”
Pottery and other artifacts have suggested that Egyptians may have traded goods and knowledge across neighboring regions, but genetic evidence of just how closely different ancient civilizations mingled has been harder to pin down because conditions such as heat and humidity quickly degrade DNA, according to the study authors. This man’s remains, however, were unusually well-preserved in their burial container, and the scientists were able to extract DNA from one of the skeleton’s teeth.
While the findings only capture the genetic background of one person, experts said additional work could help answer an enduring question about the ancestry of the first Egyptians who lived at the beginning of the longest-lasting known civilization.
A pottery vessel containing the man's remains was discovered in 1902. - Garstang Museum of Archaeology, University of Liverpool 請至原網頁觀看照片
Decoding a DNA puzzle
Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo, who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2022 for sequencing the first Neanderthal genome, made pioneering attempts 40 years ago to extract and study DNA from ancient Egyptian remains, but he was unable to sequence a genome. Poor DNA preservation consistently posed an obstacle.
Since then, the genomes of three ancient Egyptian people have been only partially sequenced by researchers using “target-enriched sequencing” to focus on specific markers of interest in the specimens’ DNA. The remains used in that work date back to a more recent time in Egyptian history, from 787 BC to AD 23.
It was ultimately improvements in technology over the past decade that paved the way for the authors of the new study to finally sequence an entire ancient Egyptian genome.
“The technique we used for this study is generally referred to as ‘shotgun sequencing,’ which means we sequence all DNA molecules isolated from the teeth, giving us coverage across the whole genome,” wrote study coauthor Dr. Linus Girdland-Flink, a lecturer in biomolecular archaeology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, in an email. “Our approach means that any future researcher can access the whole genome we published to find additional information. This also means there is no need to return to this individual for additional sampling of bone or tooth material.”
The man, who died during a time of transition between Egypt’s Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods, was not mummified before burial because it was not yet standard practice — and that likely preserved his DNA, the researchers said.
“It may have been a lucky circumstance — perhaps we found the needle in the haystack,” Girdland-Flink said. “But I think we will see additional genomes published from ancient Egypt over the coming years, possibly from individuals buried in ceramic pots.”
While Egypt’s overall climate is hot, the region has relatively stable temperatures, a key factor for long-term genetic preservation, Girdland-Flink said. That climate, the clay pot used for burial and the rock tomb it was placed in all played a role in preventing the man’s DNA from deteriorating, he said.
The clay pot was found inside a tomb cut into the rock at Nuwayrat, south of Cairo. - Garstang Museum of Archaeology, University of Liverpool 請至原網頁觀看照片
Tracing unique ancestry
For their analysis, the researchers took small samples of the root tips of one of the man’s teeth. They analyzed the cementum, a dental tissue that locks the teeth into the jaw, because it is an excellent tool for DNA preservation, Girdland-Flink said.
Of the seven DNA extracts taken from the tooth, two were preserved enough to be sequenced. Then, the scientists compared the ancient Egyptian genome with those of more than 3,000 modern people and 805 ancient individuals, according to the study authors.
Chemical signals called isotopes in the man’s tooth recorded information about the environment where he grew up and the diet he consumed as a child as his teeth grew. The results were consistent with a childhood spent in the hot, dry climate of the Nile Valley, consuming wheat, barley, animal protein and plants associated with Egypt.
But 20% of the man’s ancestry best matches older genomes from Mesopotamia, suggesting that the movement of people into Egypt at some point may have been fairly substantial, Girdland-Flink.
Dental anthropologist and study coauthor Joel Irish also took forensic measurements of the man’s teeth and cranium, which matched best with a Western Asian individual. Irish is a professor in the School of Biological and Environmental Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University.
The study provides a glimpse into a crucial time and place for which there haven’t been samples before, according to Iosif Lazaridis, a research associate in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Lazaridis was not involved with the new study but has done research on ancient DNA samples from Mesopotamia and the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean area that includes modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and parts of Turkey.
The remains are now kept at World Museum Liverpool. - Garstang Museum of Archaeology, University of Liverpool 請至原網頁觀看照片
Researchers have long questioned whether the Egyptians from the beginnings of the Dynastic civilization were indigenous North Africans or Levantine, Lazaridis said.
“What this sample does tell us is that at such an early date there were people in Egypt that were mostly North African in ancestry, but with some contribution of ancestry from Mesopotamia,” Lazaridis said. “This makes perfect sense geographically.”
Lazaridis said he hopes it’s the beginning of more research on Egypt, acknowledging that while mummification helped preserve soft tissue in mummies, the chemical treatments used in the mummification process were not ideal for ancient DNA preservation.
“I think it is now shown that it is feasible to extract DNA from people from the beginnings of Egyptian civilization and the genetic history of Egypt can now begin to be written,” he said.
A mysterious burial
By studying the man’s skeleton, the team was able to determine that he was just over 5 feet tall and between 44 and 64 years old, likely closer to the end of that range — “which is incredibly old for that time period, probably like 80s would be today,” Irish said.
Genetic analysis suggests he had brown eyes and hair and dark skin. And his bones told another tale: just how hard he labored in life, which seems at odds with the ceremonial way he was buried within the ceramic vessel.
Indications of arthritis and osteoporosis were evident in his bones, while features within the back of his skull and vertebra showed he was looking down and leaning forward for much of his lifetime, Irish said. Muscle markings show he was holding his arms out in front of him for extended periods of time and carrying heavy materials. The sit bones of his pelvis were also incredibly inflated, which occurs when someone sits on a hard surface over decades. There were also signs of substantial arthritis within his right foot.
Irish looked over ancient Egyptian imagery of different occupations, including pottery making, masonry, soldering, farming and weaving, to figure out how the man might have spent his time.
“Though circumstantial these clues point towards pottery, including use of a pottery wheel, which arrived in Egypt around the same time,” Irish said. “That said, his higher-class burial is not expected for a potter, who would not normally receive such treatment. Perhaps he was exceptionally skilled or successful to advance his social status.”
Before the pottery wheel and writing systems were shared between cultures, domesticated plants and animals spread across the Fertile Crescent and Egypt in the sixth millennium BC, as societies transitioned from being hunter-gatherers to living in permanent settlements. Now, the study team wonders whether human migrations were also part of that shift. Additional ancient genomes from Egypt, Africa and the Fertile Crescent could supply answers about who lived where and when.
“This is just one piece of the puzzle that is human genetic variation: each person who ever lived — and their genome — represents a unique piece in that puzzle,” Girdland-Flink said in an email. “While we will never be able to sequence everyone’s genome, my hope is that we can gather enough diverse samples from around the world to accurately reconstruct the key events in human history that have shaped who we are today.”
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從DNA了解德尼索文人-Linda Ongaro
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Their DNA Still Lives in Us, But Who Were the Denisovans?
Linda Ongaro, 11/26/24
請至原網頁觀看照片
It started with a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia in the late 2000s. Thanks to advances in DNA analysis, this was all that was required for scientists to be able to identify an entirely new group of hominins, meaning upright primates on the same evolutionary branch as humans.
Now known as the Denisovans (De-NEES-ovans), after the Denisova cave in which the finger bone was found, the past few years have seen numerous other discoveries about these people. I’ve recently co-published a paper collating everything we know so far.
So who were the Denisovans, where did they live, and why are they important to the story of humanity?
Around 600,000 years ago, early humans in Africa diverged into groups. Some migrated out of Africa, becoming Neanderthals in eastern and western Eurasia and Denisovans in eastern Eurasia.
Modern humans later evolved in Africa, spread across the globe, and encountered Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly other unknown archaic human groups. Yet by 40,000 years ago, only modern humans remained on the archaeological record.
The genetic legacy
Unlike Neanderthals, whose fossils are relatively abundant, Denisovan remains continue to be very scarce. Apart from that Siberian finger bone, the main other discovery was a jawbone found in China, in a limestone cave located on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. It had been believed that the Denisovans had been confined to Siberia, but this jawbone demonstrated that they had lived much further afield.
Their DNA has enabled scientists to build on this insight, since it survives in contemporary populations, particularly in Oceania, parts of Asia, and even Indigenous American populations. This shows that the Denisovans were widely distributed across these areas.
From Tibet to the Americas, the Denisovans certainly got around. Dmitry Kalinovsky 請至原網頁觀看照片
Strikingly, recent studies reveal that Denisovans interbred with modern humans multiple times. For instance, east Asians harbour ancestry from at least two distinct Denisovan populations. Also, the people of Papua New Guinea, which retain up to 5% Denisovan ancestry, a much higher proportion than other groups, interbred with at least two Denisovan groups at different times.
Additionally, research has shown that some populations from the Philippines carry a distinct Denisovan ancestry compared to their neighbouring groups. These various genetic differences highlight that the interbreeding between modern humans and Denisovans has a complex history.
Adaptations
While much about the Denisovans’ lifestyle, appearance and culture remains unknown, the discovery of the Tibetan jawbone showed that these people lived in diverse environments, and that they must have been very adaptable. Sure enough, we now know that Denisovan ancestry in modern humans has contributed to adaptive traits, particularly in challenging environments.
A notable example is the EPAS1 gene. Inherited from Denisovans, it helps regulate the body’s response to low oxygen levels, giving Tibetans a physiological advantage in the high altitudes of the Tibetan plateau.
Other human adaptations possibly derived from Denisovan interbreeding relate to being able to tolerate cold weather, and being able to metabolise lipids, which include fats and oils. These may have been beneficial for populations in northern regions, such as the Arctic. For example, Inuit populations carry Denisovan genes that help to regulate body fat and maintain warmth.
The Inuit may have the Denisovans to thank for their ability to tolerate harsh climes. Chris Christopherson 請至原網頁觀看照片
Some genes that aid in fighting infections also appear to have Denisovan origins. These immune-related genes might have played crucial roles in protecting ancient and modern humans from south and east Asia, the Americas and Papua New Guinea against specific pathogens, illustrating how Denisovan heritage continues to affect human health today.
Unanswered questions
Many questions about the Denisovans remain unanswered. For instance, how genetically distinct were these populations, and how many distinct groups existed? We know that at least four distinct Denisovan populations interbred with modern humans. However, with further analyses, this number might increase, revealing an even more complex story.
We’re also looking for a better understanding of the biological impact of Denisovan DNA in modern humans. While many beneficial traits have been identified as derived from Neanderthals, only a few have been found for Denisovans so far. Many other potential contributions remain to be explored.
This will be possible only if additional Denisovan remains are discovered and DNA is extracted and sequenced. We need more data, especially from diverse geographical regions and time periods, to provide new insights into these people’s adaptations, interactions with other hominins, and lasting legacy in human evolution.
The first reconstruction of a Denisovan, from Hebrew University in 2019. UPI/Alamy 請至原網頁觀看照片
To address these questions, our research capabilities will need to improve. For example, we need new tools to more accurately distinguish Denisovan genetic material from Neanderthal and modern human DNA.
Additionally, studying Denisovan ancestry in populations beyond east Asia and Oceania, such as Indigenous Americans, could shed light on exactly which Denisovan sources have contributed to modern humans genomes.
The discoveries to date highlight the power of genetic studies in uncovering hidden chapters of our past. Each discovery brings us closer to understanding who the Denisovans were and how their lives and adaptations continue to affect humans today.
Linda Ongaro, Research Fellow in Genetics, Trinity College Dublin
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露西給人類學帶來的啟示 ---- M. Marshall/C. Barras
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How we misunderstood what the Lucy fossil reveals about ancient humans
It has been 50 years since archaeologists discovered Lucy, perhaps the most famous ancient hominin ever found. But the scientists who have studied her say that this fossil gave us a misleading image of the nature of her species
Michael Marshall/Colin Barras, 11/15/24
A reconstruction of the famous hominin Lucy, Frank Nowikowski/Alamy 請至原網頁觀看照片(需訂閱)
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.
One hundred years ago, on 28 November 1924, anthropologist Raymond Dart opened a crate. It held a consignment of fossils from Taung, a quarry in South Africa, including a small skull that looked part-ape, part-human. Dart named it “Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa”. It was the first Australopithecus specimen to be identified, and the first evidence that early humans evolved in Africa – instead of Eurasia as was widely assumed at the time. The importance of the “Taung Child”, as it’s known, is crystal clear.
Half a century later, Donald Johanson and his colleagues were excavating in the Afar region of Ethiopia. They found a partial skeleton on 24 November 1974 – almost 50 years to the day after Dart opened his crate. During the subsequent celebrations, they played the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, and expedition member Pamela Alderman suggested calling the skeleton “Lucy”.
Later, this ancient human also got a scientific name: Australopithecus afarensis. But the name “Lucy” stuck and became part of pop culture, in a way that “the Taung Child” hadn’t. Nowadays it is the done thing to assign names to significant hominin specimens: hence we have the famous fossils known as Neo, Selam and Denny.
(Incidentally it has also been 20 years since the publication of the papers describing another ancient human species, the “hobbits”, Homo floresiensis, from Flores in Indonesia. However, the remains were found in 2003, so I’m not counting it as a major anniversary. Likewise, the species Homo habilis was first described in 1964, 60 years ago, but the remains were found several years earlier.)
So, what made Lucy such a big deal?
Donald Johanson assembles the Lucy skeleton for the first time with French colleague Maurice Taiebe in 1974, Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University 請至原網頁觀看照片(需訂閱)
Lucy is one of those stories that I have heard a few times too often. I was born in the early 1980s, some years after the discovery. When I became interested in human evolution, Lucy’s discovery was an established myth, endlessly told and retold.
As a result, my relationship to Lucy is a bit like my relationship to the Beatles: they belong to my parents’ generation. The band’s music is so influential, so widely copied, that it takes a hefty imagination to understand what it must have been like to experience it as brand new: to hear that dramatic suspended chord at the start of A Hard Day’s Night or the dissonant wails of Tomorrow Never Knows, and know that you’ll never listen to music quite the same way again.
On a side note: some years ago, when I was a staff writer for New Scientist and working in the London office, a group of us who were interested in human evolution discussed our favourite species. I realise now that we all picked groups that had been discovered in the 21st century: the hobbits, Australopithecus sediba and (my pick) the Denisovans. Those were the ones that “belonged” to our generation.
Anyhow, when it comes to human evolution, Lucy is now part of the furniture. But in 1974 she was a novelty.
Lucy is held up as an amazing single find. And she is: the skeleton is about 40 per cent complete, including bits of the skull, ribcage, arms and legs. Having this many bones from a single individual reveals things you couldn’t see if you had the same number of bones, but from several dozen individuals.
“You can look at body proportions,” says Carol Ward at the University of Missouri. By studying the relative lengths of Lucy’s limbs, and other details, we can see that she walked bipedally. “She was just as good as you or I walking across the savannah.” Likewise, from her teeth and other clues, we can get a sense of her diet – which was plant-heavy.
And so we started to paint a picture of a species based on this one specimen. The thing is, Lucy is not a typical A. afarensis.
The remains of Lucy on display at the National Museum of Ethiopia, Edwin Remsberg/Alamy 請至原網頁觀看照片(需訂閱)
Today we have more fossils of A. afarensis than of most other hominins. “Lucy stands out as the smallest,” says Tim White at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you played the tape again and only Lucy were found, you’d have a fundamentally misleading image of what afarensis is.” He says it would be like if aliens abducted a human at random and got diminutive 1970s gymnast Olga Korbut, then tried to estimate our average height.
“Any time we find a fossil, we can’t assume that this is going to be the absolute average individual,” says Ward.
However, the year after Lucy was found, Johanson’s team made an equally seismic discovery at a nearby site: over 200 hominin bones belonging to at least 13 individuals. They are probably all A. afarensis, like Lucy, and date from the same time: 3.2 million years ago. Technically known as “A.L. 333” (meaning, fossil number 333 from the Afar Locality), they are nicknamed the “First Family”.
“That afarensis sample is the gold standard for all early hominids until Neanderthals,” says Ward. Because so many individuals are preserved, “we actually have a window into variation in one species in the past”.
This makes it easier to decide if a new specimen represents a new species or is just another A. afarensis. “We have young and old individuals, we can say something about growth,” says Ward. “We have males and females, you can talk about dimorphism and social behaviour.”
The fact so many individuals were found together implies that A. afarensis lived in groups, says Johanson, who is now at Arizona State University. “Males and females lived together with offspring,” he says. “That, to me, was quite remarkable.” In contrast, he points out, the Taung Child from 50 years earlier was found in isolation.
Raymond Dart with the Taung child fossil, Science History Images/Alamy 請至原網頁觀看照片(需訂閱)
Lucy is best understood as part of the broader collection of A. afarensis fossils from that time period. Taken as a set, these bones paint a picture of a population of hominins roaming the Ethiopian landscape. They show us A. afarensis, not as a single data point on the line between apes and humans, but as living, breathing hominins that walked around and ate and had babies. Lucy may have personalised extinct hominins for the first time, but the First Family diversified them.
For White, the biggest discoveries in palaeo-anthropology have been the ones where lots of individuals are found together. A.L. 333 is one such example. He also cites the Aramis horizon in Ethiopia, which has yielded Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and Homo remains; Dmanisi in Georgia, with its Homo erectus remains that told us a lot about the first hominin to live outside Africa; and Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain, which holds the remains of early Neanderthals.
What unites these sites, argues White, is that they allow you to study a species in something approximating its full richness, rather than simply how it differs from another species.
Ward offers another perspective on the importance of spectacular fossils like Lucy. “Big finds are truly remarkable,” she says. “What they do is, they don’t answer the questions: they bring up the new questions.” When Johanson and his team found Lucy, by extension they also found her entire species – and that raised all sorts of questions that could only be answered by more A. afarensis fossils.
“The hard part of science is not answering questions,” says Ward. “It’s knowing which questions to ask, because if you don’t ask the right questions, you’ll never get the right answers.” The lasting importance of Lucy, and the Taung Child for that matter, is that they prompted people to ask new questions. I never want to hear the story about the song ever again, but so long as Lucy keeps triggering new ideas and questions, she’ll continue to be important.
Read more：
How the secrets of ancient cuneiform texts are being revealed by AI
Why did humans evolve big brains? A new idea bodes ill for our future
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猿類演化地區-T. Kokkinidis
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Fossils in Greece Suggest Human Ancestors Evolved in Europe, Not Africa
Tasos Kokkinidis, 11/20/24
This upper mandible was found in Nikiti in northern Greece. Credit: New Scientist/David Begun 請至原網頁觀看照片
A recent analysis of fossils recovered in the 1990s in the village of Nikiti in northern Greece supports the controversial theory that apes, the ancestors of humans, evolved in Southeastern Europe instead of Africa.
The 8 or 9-million-year-old fossils had first been linked to the extinct ape called Ouranopithecus.
However, a team led by David Begun from the University of Toronto’s Department of Anthropology has recently analyzed the remains and determined that they likely belonged to a male animal from a potentially new species.
By inspecting the upper and lower jaw of the ancient European ape, the team suggested that humanity’s forebears may have evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa, potentially upending a scientific consensus that has stood since Darwin’s day.
In 1871, Darwin proposed that all hominins, including both modern and extinct humans, descended from a group in Africa. This is the most widely accepted theory today.
Fossils in Greece belong to human ancestors
On the other hand, Darwin also speculated that hominins could also have originated in Europe, where fossils of large apes had already been discovered. The new analysis supports this theory.
While Begun does not believe the ape in Greece was a hominin, he speculates that it could represent the group from which hominins directly evolved.
The research team led by Begun had determined in 2017 that a 7.2-million-year-old ape called Graecopithecus, which also lived in what is now Greece, could be a hominin.
In this case, the 8-million to 9-million-year-old Nikiti ape would have directly preceded the first hominin, Graecopithecus, before hominins migrated to Africa seven million years ago.
According to a report in the journal New Scientist, Begun foresees that this new concept will be rejected by many experts who believe in African hominin origins, but he hopes that the new scenario will at least be considered.
Begun points out that Southeastern Europe was once occupied by the ancestors of animals such as the giraffe and rhino. “It’s widely agreed that this was the found fauna of most of what we see in Africa today,” he told New Scientist. “If the antelopes and giraffes could get into Africa 7 million years ago, why not the apes?”
Not all anthropologists agree with Begun and his team’s conclusions. As noted by New Scientist, the Nikiti ape may be completely unrelated to hominins. It may have evolved similar features independently, developing teeth to eat similar foods or chew similarly to early hominins.
Related:
Homo Sapiens May Not Have Been the First Species to Use Fire
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林德索人消失之謎可能有解 -- Katie Hunt
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Cave discovery in France may explain why Neanderthals disappeared, scientists say
Katie Hunt, CNN, 09/12/24
When archaeologist Ludovic Slimak unearthed five teeth in a rock shelter in France’s Rhône Valley in 2015, it was immediately obvious that they belonged to a Neanderthal, the first intact remains of the ancient species to be discovered in that country since 1979.
However, the once-in-a-lifetime find, nicknamed Thorin after a character in “The Hobbit,” remained a well-kept secret for almost a decade while Slimak and his colleagues untangled the significance of the find — a fraught undertaking that pitted experts in ancient DNA against archaeologists.
“We faced a major issue,” said Slimak, a researcher at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. “The genetics was sure the Neanderthal we called Thorin was 105,000 years old. But we knew by (the specimen’s) archaeological context that it was somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 years old.”
“What the DNA was suggesting was not in accordance with what we saw,” he added.
It took the team almost 10 years to piece together the story of the puzzling Neanderthal, adding a new chapter in the long-standing mystery of why these humans disappeared around 40,000 years ago.
The research, published Wednesday in the journal Cell Genomics, found that Thorin belonged to a lineage or group of Neanderthals that had been isolated from other groups for some 50,000 years. This genetic isolation was the reason Thorin’s DNA seemed to come from an earlier time period than it actually did.
Until now, geneticists thought that at the time of extinction there was one Neanderthal population that was genetically homogeneous, but the new study reveals at least two populations were present in Western Europe at that time — and they lived surprisingly close to each other.
“The Thorin population spent 50,000 years without exchanging genes with other Neanderthal populations,” Slimak said in a news release.
“We thus have 50 millennia during which two Neanderthal populations, living about ten days’ walk from each other, coexisted while completely ignoring each other.”
Slimak said that the discovery suggested that Neanderthal communities were small and insular — factors that could be key to understanding their extinction because isolation is generally considered to be an evolutionary disadvantage.
Less genetic variation could make it harder to adapt to changing climate or disease, while less social interaction between groups makes it harder to share knowledge and technology.
“They were happy in their valley and did not need to move, while Homo sapiens all the time they want to explore, to see what is there after this river, after this mountain. (We have) this need, this need to move, and this need to build a social network,” Slimak said.
This pattern of small populations, isolated culturally and genetically from one another, was likely a major factor behind Neanderthal extinction, which occurred around the same time Homo sapiens arrived in Europe, he said.
DNA from Homo sapiens fossils from that time show that these early arrivals interbred with Neanderthals — traces of those encounters remain in present-day human populations. However, no corresponding genetic evidence of that interbreeding has been found in Neanderthal fossils from that time, including Thorin’s remains, the study noted.
Whatever behavior led to this lack of genetic intermingling on one side, along with small and isolated Neanderthal populations such as the one Slimak and his colleagues identified, likely contributed to the disappearance of the Neanderthals, said Chris Stringer, research lead in human evolution at London’s Natural History Museum who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Whatever the reasons for this imbalance (social, biological?) it contributed to the demise of the last Neanderthals, since their already small populations were losing reproductive age individuals to the other species, without any replenishment in return,” Stringer said via email.
“Coupled with economic competition from the newcomers over resources, this could have been a recipe for demographic collapse.”
It’s not clear whether Thorin’s full skeleton is interred within Grotte Mandrin, as the rock shelter in the Rhône Valley near Malataverne, France, is known. The remains were found near the surface in soft, unstable ground, and the excavation continues slowly, Slimak said, with archaeologists tweezing out “one grain at a time.” It’s also unclear whether the specimen, which is male, was deliberately buried or not.
Archaeologists have excavated more of Thorin’s remains: 31 teeth, part of the jaw and five finger bones, so far. The shape of his teeth is typical of a Neanderthal, but he had two extra lower molars — a trait sometimes suggestive of an inbred population, the study noted.
Genetic mystery resolved
The initial genetic analysis suggested that Thorin was much older because his genome was distinct from other later Neanderthals, resembling the genomes of ancient humans who lived more than 100,000 years ago.
To understand Thorin’s origins and confirm the age of his remains, the team analyzed chemical isotopes in his bones and teeth to infer what type of climate he lived in based on the water he would have drunk and other factors. A Neanderthal in Europe 105,000 years ago would have a enjoyed a much warmer climate than one living 45,000 years ago during the Ice Age.
“We worked for seven years to find out who was wrong — archaeologists or genomicists,” Slimak said in the news release.
Slimak has been involved in the excavation of Grotte Mandrin for more than three decades and made a number of exciting finds at the rock shelter. It’s the only known site to have been home to alternating groups of both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, plus the earliest evidence of bow and arrow use outside Africa.
“Grotte Mandrin keeps delivering surprises,” Stringer said.
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史前人的智慧 -- Darren Orf
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此之謂：「窮則變；變則通」；或：「需要為發明之母」。
Archaeologists Figured Out How Early Humans Killed Ice Age Mammoths. It’s Not How You Think.
190(ish) pounds versus six tons isn’t exactly a fair fight—but our earliest ancestors evened the playing field.
Darren Orf, 08/29/24
* Depictions of ancient humans in both scientific and popular culture contexts picture them throwing spears at the thick hides of mammoths.
* A new study from archaeologists at UC Berkeley suggests that Pleistocene hunters likely used planted pikes, topped with sharp Clovis points, to kill megafauna like mammoths, mastodons, and even saber-toothed cats.
* This theory shows how this system would’ve acted like an ancient hollow-point bullet and delivered a more devastating blow compared to a thrown spear.
It’s been long suggests that the arrival of Homo sapiens in the Americas caused (or at very least contributed to) the disappearance of megafauna like mammoths through overhunting—but how exactly did a collection of small, fragile humans take down these four-to-six ton behemoths some 13,000 years ago?
The typical depiction of humans hunting mammoths toward the tail of the Pleistocene imagines them chucking spears, tipped with sharp rocks known as Clovis points, as the beasts rear up on their hind legs in fury, but a new study from archaeologists at UC Berkeley think that ancient humans likely worked smarter, not harder.
Instead of throwing spears, which likely would’ve had little impact force on the animal, this new study published in the journal PLOS One says that hunters likely planted their spears in the ground and waited for charging mastodons, bison, or even saber-toothed cats to impale themselves upon the fearsome spiked tips. This would have driven the spear much deeper into the animals, almost acting like a modern hollow-point bullet, according to the researchers.
“This ancient Native American design was an amazing innovation in hunting strategies,” UC Berkeley’s Scott Byram, first author of the study, said in a press statement. “This distinctive Indigenous technology is providing a window into hunting and survival techniques used for millennia throughout much of the world.”
This mystery initially began with the discovery of Clovis points, an array of various-sized sharp rocks made from material like flint or jasper that use fluted indentations at the base of the stone. This rock is one of the most common archaeological items found during this period, but experts weren’t exactly sure how they used them, as the Clovis point is usually the only part of the weapon system that survives the ravages of time.
After analyzing historical records of people hunting or fighting with planted pikes, the team also designed a test platform to see how much force a spear could withstand before snapping. Similar experiments that launched spiked weapons at ballistic gels showed that a spear, thrown at an animal like a mastodon, would’ve felt like little more than a pinprick, the researchers say. But the foreshaft collapse following the Clovis point's entry into an animal’s hide likely would’ve increased the damage.
“The kind of energy that you can generate with the human arm is nothing like the kind of energy generated by a charging animal,” UC Berkeley’s Jun Sunseri, a co-author of the study, said in a press statement. “It’s an order of magnitude different. These spears were engineered to do what they’re doing to protect the user.”
This new theory also supports another idea surrounding Clovis points, which is that they’re very time-consuming to make and also more resource-intensive than typical arrowheads. This means it’s unlikely that an ancient hunter could want to waste such a resource on an attack method with a low success rate.
“Sometimes in archaeology,” Byram said, “the pieces just start fitting together like they seem to now with Clovis technology, and this puts pike hunting front and center with extinct megafauna. It opens up a whole new way of looking at how people lived among these incredible animals during much of human history.”
Although the strategy behind ancient humans’ megafauna hunting efforts appears to be coalescing, Byram and his team want to conduct a more realistic test involving a replica mammoth to simulate what would happen if a charging animal ran directly into this theorized pike system. However, because archaeologists only find Clovis points and not the accompanying weapon system, it's difficult to know for sure if such a system was used.
If it works as expected, we’ll need to rewrite our understanding of how indigenous peoples survived and thrived in the Americas 13,000 years ago and beyond.
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新定時技術有助於了解早期人類史 -- Aristos Georgiou
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Major' Archaeological Development May Help Rewrite Early Human History
Aristos Georgiou, 06/09/24
An innovative technique used in a study of Neanderthal hearths—places where fires were created—has been described by researchers as a "major" development in archaeology, one that could help shed light on prehistoric humans' behavior.
For a study published in the journal Nature, an interdisciplinary team of researchers found that a series of six Neanderthal hearths at El Salt, a Paleolithic site in Spain, were formed over at least 200 to 240 years, with each one likely having been created decades apart.
The findings are significant because determining the timescale of human activity in the Paleolithic period, also known as the Old Stone Age, has long been one of the most challenging problems in prehistoric archaeology. (This period in human prehistory extends from the earliest use of stone tools more than 3 million years ago to around 12,000 years ago.)
Resolving the timescale of such activity is difficult largely because of the limitations of dating techniques. For example, radiocarbon techniques cannot date samples that are older than around 50,000 to 60,000 years. Meanwhile, other techniques can produce errors of several thousand years.
Researcher Santiago Sossa-Ríos examines a hearth at El Salt, an archaeological site in Spain. Researchers have used an innovative technique to shed light on the chronology of six Neanderthal hearths at the site. SVEN KLEINHAPL/UNIVERSITY OF VALENCIA 請至原網頁觀看照片
"Although it has been proposed that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were highly mobile, key aspects of their lifestyle, such as the time between camps and the size of traveling groups, remain unclear," the study's authors wrote. "Complexity in the formation of Paleolithic sites makes it difficult to single out human occupation episodes and resolve the time between them."
In the latest study, the research team—led by Ángela Herrejón-Lagunilla of Spain's University of Burgos—attempted to address this problem by examining hearths at El Salt, dated to around 52,000 years ago, with an innovative technique.
The technique involved a combination of "archaeostratigraphic" analyses—which helped the team determine the order the hearths were created in, based on their relative position in the ground layers—and an approach known as archaeomagnetic dating.
This technique studies and interprets signatures of the Earth's past magnetic field as recorded in burned archaeological remains. The approach works, given that burnt materials hold a record of the direction and/or intensity of the magnetic field at the time of the last fire.
The combination of the two approaches revealed that the Neanderthal hearths at El Salt were created decades or even up to a century apart—a finding that sheds light on the behavior of these early humans, who went extinct around 40,000 years ago. The results provide an indication of the timing of the hearths in unprecedented resolution.
"When we excavate archaeological settlement areas, we assume that they are the result of many events of human activity, but until now we did not know exactly how much time had passed between these activities. We did not know whether it was decades, centuries or thousands of years," said Santiago Sossa-Ríos, a researcher in prehistory, archaeology and ancient history at Spain's University of Valencia and an author on the study, in a press release.
"From there, within this temporary framework, we can open up new lines of investigation to study, for example, patterns of mobility, technological change or differences in the use of space," he continued. "The time is there, the challenge lies in combining and extracting everything that the methods offer us to uncover it."
Hearths can yield useful information about Neanderthal life because they are good indicators of occupation within a given site.
The new findings indicate that while Neanderthals were highly mobile, in some cases they may have returned to previous settlements after lengthy periods but still within the space of individual lifetimes.
In Paleolithic archaeology, a discipline in which human behavior is usually studied on long timescales typical of geological processes, being able to observe changes on timescales closer to a human lifespan is a significant development.
As a result, the techniques employed in the study could help to shed light on Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. They could even be applied to other archaeological contexts to resolve the timings of human activity.
"It is definitely a major step forward in archaeology, which will help us to better understand human behavior in the past," the study's authors said in the press release.
Aristos Georgiou is a Newsweek science reporter with the London, U.K., bureau. He reports on science and health topics, including; animal, mental health, and psychology-related stories. Aristos joined Newsweek in 2018 from IBTimes UK and had previously worked at The World Weekly. He is a graduate of the University of Nottingham and City University, London. Languages: English. You can get in touch with Aristos by emailing a.georgiou@newsweek.com.
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現代人和林德索人混血兒 ---- BENJAMIN TAUB
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How A Human-Neanderthal Hybrid Child Rewrote Human History
Our family tree is much messier than we thought.
BENJAMIN TAUB, Edited by Laura Simmons, 05/08/24
The Lapedo Child has a modern human jaw but Neanderthal limbs. Image credit: Microgen/Shutterstock.com (請至原網頁觀看相關照片)
Around 24,500 years ago, the body of a 4-year-old child was wrapped in an ochre-dyed shroud and lowered into a burial pit in the Lapedo Valley of central Portugal. Unlike any whippersnapper alive today, however, this extraordinary child exhibited a unique blend of modern human and Neanderthal features, disproving everything we thought we knew about the history of our species.
Known as the Lapedo Child, the youngster’s complete skeleton was discovered in 1998. Until then, anthropologists had assumed that modern humans evolved in East Africa before spreading across Eurasia and replacing the more archaic hominids that lived there – including Neanderthals.
This narrative supposed that we and our ancient relatives were completely separate species that could not interbreed, and that our expansion resulted in the extinction of our more primitive cousins. The Lapedo Child ripped up this script, prompting the discoverers to propose that modern humans did mate with Neanderthals, and that the genetic code of this extinct species persisted within the hybrid lineage that flowed from the loins of our cross-pollinating ancestors.
Thought to have been a male, the child himself possessed the chin and inner ear of an anatomically modern human, along with the stocky frame and limbs of a Neanderthal. Such a finding initially sent shockwaves through the anthropological world, sparking fierce debate as to what this all meant for human history.
In their original study on the skeleton, the authors note that the child lived several thousand years after Neanderthals had supposedly disappeared, suggesting that these ancestral traits must have been deeply ingrained within the human genome and that the young boy was therefore “the descendant of extensively admixed populations.” In other words, interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals didn’t just happen once or twice, but occurred on a population level, resulting in significant hybridization.
This, in turn, implies that Neanderthals didn’t simply die out when modern humans came along, but repeatedly hooked up with their new neighbours to the extent that they partially merged with them.
At the time of the discovery, this idea was seen as pretty radical and somewhat shocking, prompting some scholars to refute the original findings. One analysis, for instance, concluded that the Lapedo Child was not a hybrid after all but, was just an oddly-shaped modern human sprog.
However, the admixture theory was finally proven in 2010 when researchers sequenced the Neanderthal genome. In doing so, they revealed that all modern non-African populations contain between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA, thus confirming that our ancient ancestors did interbreed with these extinct hominids.
Thankfully, our phenotypes have straightened out somewhat over the millennia and we no longer possess the Neanderthal physique. However, like the Lapedo Child, those of us who hail from outside of Africa are all modern human-Neanderthal hybrids.
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